JACK BANKS

I spent much of my spare time during the years 1982-1984 working on this sequence of 73 drawings that I later gave the collegiately pretentious title “The Mind Which Creates the Man Who Suffers.”  At the time, I regarded it as ferociously important.  It was the vehicle through which I more or less taught myself to draw. (to the extent that one could say I have ever truly mastered that skill) But it also provided a way for me to come to terms with my wanting to draw in the first place.





The recent untimely death of my old Reed College friend Ron Wiesel may have nudged me to have another look after all these years. Ron was around during much of the time I was working on this.  He was a vocal critic as well as an exuberant supporter.  Ron and I collaborated on various projects over the years: acting, writing, photography, comic book art, to mention just a few.  But I most often remember Ron in connection with this particular project.  He enthusiastically listened to me describe what I thought I was doing with it. He helped me to publish a great portion of it in a magazine the two of us called “Oasis.” And, later, he even included the entire sequence in a Portland area gallery show that featured several of his own performance pieces. 





The “themes” now seem far too abstract, the meanings quite obscure.  Some of the drafting seems clumsy;  And the style seems very, very idiosyncratic.  Even with all that said, I still see some things that interest me here after all these decades. 



Before describing just what I think “this” is, perhaps a bit of background might be useful.





When I entered high school I had an unrealistic and almost child like fantasy that one day I might become a writer for comic books.  The long summers I had spent in Georgian Bay, Ontario - away from electricity and the diversion of television - had led me to develop a nerd’s highly developed appreciation for this very visual and highly affecting kind of story telling.  The medium seemed very constrained at that time: the outdated comics code and the overemphasis of superheroes. So much has changed since then with the emergence of the so called “graphic novel” and the industry’s more diverse publishing options.  But, at the time it was a deeply felt dream for me that one day there might also be adult story telling in comics.





When I was 16, I discovered that a student in my school (in fact my practice partner on the wrestling team, Joe Tarbay) was a very talented painter and draftsman.  I had seen his painted version of Swamp Thing in the recent school wide painting exhibition.  So I pitched him my idea for a comic book story we could do together: an adaptation of a Moliere play that I had recently acted in!!  I was quite animated.  I told him my ideas for utilizing Frank Bellamy zig zag frame breaks, ways to incorporate all the seemingly endless dialogue.  I even showed him “Heros the Spartan” layouts I had found in obscure comics histories.  MOLIERE!? WTF?!  Needless to say, he was not swept up by my excitement.  Creatures were, apparently, more his driving focus.





What did I expect? It was at this moment that I realized that if I were ever going to create anything comic related that I was going to have to learn to do the drawing myself.  The only problem - I had no aptitude or experience.  I had secretly sketched objects in my bedroom. (with horrid results) I had looked at “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way;” but that moment when that oval that was supposed to be a place holder for the figure’s head morphed into a perfect set of human facial features never happened for me the way it did in the “how to” diagrams.  So much for ever mastering the comic book basics!





But I was still drawn to trying a certain kind of illustration.  Susan Darling, the drawing and painting instructor at the Albany Academy for Girls, gave me some unexpected encouragement when she loaned me one of her rapidograph technical pens. “Here. See if you might like using this.” It was perfect.  There was something about the hard clarity of the lines and the stark black on white that appealed to me right away.  Plus, there was a kind of formal intensity about the resulting look that made my rather lame attempts appear more polished than they really were.





For the next year or two I would “illustrate” my own adolescent poems and more pretentious prose with these kinds of stylized and crude drawings.  I think I thought that I was doing the modern day equivalent of illuminating a manuscript.  I would arrange the various “panels” of text/drawing in a kind of sequence.  The writing in one might have some novel segue into the topic of the panel that followed; and the images in one panel would usually evolve (through close up, pulling back, or some other motion within a given frame) in ways that were meant to create original juxtapositions.





Despite the fact that I regarded what I was doing as “Serious,” I never seemed to approach the whole enterprise with much discipline.  I would look at the ease with which a friend like Kim Dagneau would use paints and watercolors and think, “I will never be the kind of person who can do THAT; so why kill myself trying?”  Instead, I became more consumed with examining the aesthetic underpinnings of this kind of work. 

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For instance, what did it mean to have more than one image? Did one image offer points of reference that made other images more understandable?  Did multiple images introduce the element of movement, movement within a visual frame or even movement within the overall visual space?  Or was it the element of time what was introduced?  I would think about the Bayeux Tapestry, narrative cave paintings, medieval tryptic altar pieces, the transition from pictograms to hieroglyphs and to cuneiform, ancient Greek frieze relief sculpture, gothic cathedral stone carvings and stain glass sequences. I even had dreams of existing within comic book frames, an experience I tried to reproduce with what looked like minimalist paintings of simple shapes subtly moving within subsequent panels.



This kind of thinking (and there were endless pages of writing too!) was all very self indulgent.  I can easily recognize the quintessential college student pretense and self importance.  Looking back now, I think this was a process of consoling myself.  If I would never quite master the requisite drawing and technical skills, then I could at least argue for the intellectual validity of what I came to call “sequential art.” 



But still I tried to draw in whatever way I could.  A series of illustrations I had started in 1981 was something I continued to work on in fits and starts.  During the mid March Spring break of 1982 I holed up in my dilapidated, “Eraserhead” studio apartment in Northwest Portland to work on what was to have become the fourth in this series of drawings. Initially I thought I would be able to finish it all in three days or so; but as I got into the project, I realized that it was much more complicated than I had thought.  It involved looking in through a couple of exterior windows into an intricately arranged bedroom scene.  There were to be lots of objects.  There were details like dimensions, where walls met floors and ceilings! And there was a mirror!! I stared at my successive failed sketches and gradually realized I had no idea how to pull this project together.



Perhaps it was my dismal surroundings: the 30 year old carpet, the cheap paneling too dirty to ever get clean again, the exposed lumber studs in the tiny bathroom, over-painted battleship gray with rusted 1930’s era hardware.  Perhaps it was the feeling of isolation. My girlfriend had gone home to see her family in Los Angeles. Reed College and the “normal” life it represented were located on the extreme opposite side of the city.  Perhaps it was the drab, pre-yuppie era urban streets near West Burnside that I wandered to stock up on ramen noodles and instant coffee.  Perhaps it was the life I could see going on inside the less depressingly furnished apartments visible from my third floor window.  It all weighed very heavily on me at the time.  I don’t think I can ever remember feeling so not up to a task.



I took breaks. I walked the streets.  I drew diagrams.  I even constructed a model of this fictional room out of cut up manila folders and scotch tape.  I got down on the floor and looked through the cut out windows to see if this would help.  No.  Finally, I realized that I would have to give up and come back to the drawing with a more renewed sense of purpose at some future time. It was at this precise moment that I decided to take a couple of auto-exposure photos of myself. I’m sure I was bored and looking for something to take my mind off the debacle. How convenient for my purposes now.  After 4 full days of failure, here I am at 2 AM on the morning of Friday, March 19, 1982. 



I wouldn’t have the chance to return to this until that May.  I did not want a repeat of this horrible week in March, so I prepared.  I revisited one of the books from my freshman humanities class, “The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective” by Samuel Y. Edgerton.  For me it was like “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way” on steroids - and very, very helpful. This sudden commitment to a certain level discipline in those intervening months also made me become more ambitious.  I looked at my old work and decided that it was just crap.  I no longer considered it worth adding to.  However, I still wanted to finish the drawing I had initially envisioned in March.  And it was this drawing that later became the genesis of the whole drawing sequence.



I suspect that I even wanted to capture something of the experience of what failure to create in that crappy apartment felt like.  I basically decided to make the creative process (and its failure) the central theme of what would be the next sequence of drawings.  It was as if I had wanted to say, “Here are all the qualities of a bad artist; and here is how I see all those qualities - as they are embodied in me.” 

I realized at the time that I ran the risk of starting what might be merely an exercise in intense navel gazing. In retrospect, I see that that is precisely what I did!  The goal I had set for myself was finding a way to propose an alternative to the “bad” artist.  Yes, I would show the less valuable side of the creative spirit; but I would also find a way to personify  it, exorcise it, and, hopefully, "kill" it off.  Hah! What a tall order! 

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The coherence of this whole drawing sequence that took me almost 3 years to produce is debatable.  These self important and grandiose themes are  couched in such a thicket of other aesthetic issues that they are almost completely hidden.  I experienced this kind of aesthetic exorcism, sure; but did anyone else? On that level it was not particularly successful; but what I associate with the process of making it is my developing some actual skills.  I was a very different artist in 1985 than I had been when I began in 1982.  In illustration, compare these two drawings on the right. The one on top is one of the last drawings from before the project.  The one on the bottom is the first drawing after it.